AEGiS-WashBlade: Tracking a pandemic: Two-part PBS documentary puts the history of AIDS in a sobering context

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2006. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Tracking a pandemic: Two-part PBS documentary puts the history of AIDS in a sobering context

Washington Blade - May 25, 2006
Brian Moylan

For the past 25 years, it has been impossible to forget the AIDS epidemic, but it's hard to remember it correctly. The world has lived with it so long, we sometimes need to be reminded how it started, what went wrong and how it got to where it is today.

Also, for those who missed the early days of the disease or weren't alive before protease inhibitors, they need to be reminded of what life was like when an AIDS diagnosis was a fast-acting death sentence. A new two-part episode of PBS' documentary series "Frontline: The Age of AIDS" accomplishes all of this brilliantly. The four-hour episode will air for two hours each on Tuesday, May 30, and Wednesday, May 31. In the D.C./Baltimore area it will air on WETA and Maryland Public Television each night at 9 p.m.

Smartly, the program starts with the mystery surrounding the first diagnoses of a rare pneumonia among gay men in Los Angeles in 1981. From there, the information about the illness is shown to viewers in the same order as it was discovered by scientists, the media and the public at the time. While it mirrors news reports of the day, knowing where things stand with the global pandemic today makes the information an eerie foreshadowing.

The first two hours of the documentary are probably the more interesting. It deals with the discovery of HIV, the contamination of the blood supply, the closure of gay bathhouses, the effect on the gay community, the way different governments responded to the outbreak and the search for the root cause of the illness.

What will interest many viewers is how the documentary tracks how the HIV virus jumped from one chimpanzee in Africa and was allowed to spread across the globe.

THE SECOND HALF deals more with the spread of AIDS in Africa and across the globe, how different governments handled the spreading disease, the "triple cocktail" and international relief efforts. Much of this may be familiar to people who are avid readers of the gay press or have even a passing familiarity with AIDS policy.

What is remarkable is that, after 25 years, there is finally some perspective on how AIDS was initially handled. Seeing Ronald Reagan's dismissal of the disease and Jesse Helms' denying federal funds to agencies that discussed homosexual activity in prevention material is sharply contrasted with a wildly successful, timely and tolerant prevention program championed by the president of Uganda.

Though it never takes a side, this documentary is a stinging indictment of the United States AIDS policy from day one. Bill Clinton - who is interviewed for the program - is portrayed in a positive light, but Reagan and both Presidents Bush (particularly the second one) don't fare so well.

Time and again, the filmmakers show that successful HIV prevention programs are those that treat gay men, prostitutes, IV drug users and other stigmatized groups as human are the only ones that work. By trying to ignore or change these groups, efforts (especially unrealistic "faith-based" ones) always fail.

This point is proven by the work of the AIDS minister in Thailand who taught sex workers how to use condoms, but did nothing to help IV drug users because of the stigma associated with addicts in the country. HIV transmission in sex workers declined by a huge margin, but soared among those who share needles.

The history of HIV/AIDS is still being written in this country and abroad and "Frontline: The Age of AIDS" should help viewers and policy makers learn from the past and decide where and how to focus efforts in the future to make this pandemic history for good.

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